During the late war I had an infallible rule for deciding what Great Britain would do on every occasion. It was, to consider what they ought to do, and to take the reverse of that as what they would assuredly do, and I can say with truth that I was never deceived.

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

[I]t seems that the Cannibals of Europe are going to eat one another again. A war between Russia and Turkey is like the battle of the kite and snake; whichever destroys the other, leaves a destroyer the less for the world.

No knowledge can be more satisfactory to a man than that of his own frame, its parts, their functions and actions.

The excellence of every government is its adaptation to the state of those to be governed by it.

Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves.

The sun has not caught me in bed in fifty years.